Monday, February 19, 2007

Although the Economist is quite reliable on a host of issues, it has a characteristically blinkered editorial on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in this week's issue. The piece's concluding paragraphs highlight what is wrong with its recommendations:

In the 1980s Israelis did not let their divisions over the occupied lands tear their nation apart. Why should they, so long as the Palestinians gave no hint of ever accepting Israel? It all began to change when by accepting the Jewish state's permanence Arafat made the dream of peace look real to Israelis.The trick now is to make statehood look real enough to Palestinians for the majority to abandon Hamas's bleak vision of war to the end. Israelis say that they tried this at Camp David in 2000 and got nowhere. Well then, they—and the Americans—need to try again. When Palestinians come to believe that a generous two-state deal is really available, many may reconsider their support of Hamas. It is time to soften the economic pressure and negotiate a detailed promise of statehood that Mr Abbas can take to his people. It will be hard, but this is a better way to win the argument against Hamas than the past year's vain efforts to make the Palestinians jump through verbal hoops they have come to consider humiliating.

Verbal hoops? It seems to me that the people jumping through verbal hoops are the editors at the Economist. The premise for this editorial is that the great majority of Palestinians want peace, and would accept Israel if only they were certain that Israel would allow them to form a state. Unfortunately, this is simply untrue, as has been established repeatedly and incontrovertibly over several decades. It is clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that Israel would be willing – nay, eager – to relinquish its control over the West Bank, if it could do so without imperilling its security. This willigness has been expressed through opinion polls, elections and by much of the political establishment on numerous occasions, clearly and repeatedly. Therefore the availability of a generous two-state solution is manifestly not the goal that many Palestinians – not least their leaders from both Fatah and Hamas – are working for, otherwise they would have removed the main impediments to reaching such a resolution: their continuing violence against Israeli civilians, and the indoctrination of their children to believe that Israelis and Jews are the scum of the earth and that ultimately Israel will be violently removed and its residents pushed into the sea.I'm not saying that there are no extremist Israelis who hate the Palestinians, and would not want to relinquish any land under any circumstances. What I am saying is that a crushing majority of Israelis do not want to fight the Palestinians, and would be happy to give up the virtual totality of the West Bank (making up the retention of a few of the largest settlements with territorial concessions elsewhere) so that the Palestinians could establish their own state. Therefore, what needs to be done now is not encourage the Palestinians to think – as the Economist wants Israel to do – that there is a possibility of them achieving their original, preferred goal: destroying the State of Israel and expelling its Jewish residents. What needs to be done, as Daniel Pipes has ably explained, is to convince the Palestinians that the best deal they are going to get is the one being offered to them by Israel, which by dint of being a stable democracy is able to impose the will of its population's crushing majority on a recalcitrant, mostly non-violent, meager minority – as was so starkly proven when Israel evacuated the Gaza Strip. This deal being offered to the Palestinians by Israel is very similar to the end result the Economist seems to advocate. It is therefore ironic, that it should support precisely the policies that will ensure that this outcome fails to materialise.

Favourite Quotes

"To my mind, this is irregular. It is un-English; it is un-American; it is French." Mark Twain: Concerning The Jews, Harper's Magazine, March 1898

"This is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put." Winston Churchill: Pencilled in the margin of a minute issued by a civil servant who was objecting to the ending of a sentence with a preposition and the use of a dangling participle in official documents.

"To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say: You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning!" Margaret Thatcher: Conservative Party conference speech, Brighton, 10 October 1980

"Who was that lad they used to try to make me read at Oxford? Ship- Shop- Schopenhauer. That’s the name. A grouch of the most pronounced description." P. G. Wodehouse: Carry On, Jeeves – Clustering Round Young Bingo

"Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city." George Burns

"Never give in - never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy." Winston Churchill: Harrow School speech, 29 October 1941

"The profits of 'protection' go altogether to a few score select persons—who, by favors of Congress, State legislatures, the banks, and other special advantages, are forming a vulgar aristocracy, full as bad as anything in the British or European castes, of blood, or the dynasties there of the past." Walt Whitman: Prose Works, III. Notes Left Over - 11. Who Gets the Plunder?

"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." Winston Churchill: House of Commons speech on August 20, 1940. (at the peak of the Battle of Britain, referring to the RAF airmen)

"And who knows? Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the President's spouse – and I wish him well." Barbara Bush: Wellesley College commencement address, 1 June 1990

"We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields, and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender!" Winston Churchill: House of Commons speech, June 4 1940 (referring to Dunkirk)

"Earnestly hope we shall not have another war with meat-coupons and no sugar and people being killed – ridiculous and unnecessary. Wonder whether Mussolini's mother spanked him too much or too little - you never know, these psychological days." Dorothy Sayers: Busman'sHoneymoon - Diaries of the Dowager Duchess of Denver

"The gunfire around us makes it hard to hear. But the human voice is different from other sounds. It can be heard over noises that bury everything else. Even when it's not shouting. Even when it's just a whisper. Even the lowest whisper can be heard over armies – when it's telling the truth." Sydney Pollack et al.: The Interpreter [2005] (Dedication from the memoirs of Edmond Zuwanie)

"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile – hoping it will eat him last." Winston Churchill